I remember when I went to the food of the world exhibit that Dinsey had at the Worlds Fair in Flushing Meadow park. They had Belgian waffles, and steak pomme frites, and wienershnitzel and lots of food from all over the world. You went on this ride through the exhibit and all this animatronic puppets sang "It's a Small World After All" as they ate the food of their country and I am pretty sure the North Koreans were eating weimaranershnitzel.

you are unable to let them off leash because they will run after a squirrel on the other side of the road.

Yeah. That's why I have an English Setter instead. I don't want to keep a dog chained up or build a pen to try and try and keep him in it. On the other hand, that's one of the neat things about beagles and other hunting hounds. They love to hunt.

If you see one off a leash, it has it's nose to the ground sniffing for something to chase or it's chasing something. They definitely display the behaviors for which they were bred.

The dog puts its paws up in anticipation of the thrown ball, does a chicken have that capacity? Is a dog closer to us in a family sense than it is to a chicken? These are the thoughts of an unscientific mind.

@Sofa King Thanks! It really was the "yatta!" that made it so amusing (when the dog finally catches and holds the ball). I had no idea how to spell it, and now that you got me that far, I found this and I will never be the same.

Trooper, I went to that World's Fair, too, at 4 y.o., but the only thing I remember of the fair itself are the plastic Sinclair dinosaurs. The rest of the family talked about the exotic food for years, but eating cereal out of little boxes at the hotel is all I got. Perhaps they locked me in a closet while they went to the fair.

We have a beagle - she is a great dog. As Titus noted, we can't let her off leash, but when she does get her nose on the ground and is after a scent when I'm walking her, it is so much fun to watch. She snorts and then puts her head up and bays - very loudly!- and is just relentless. She kills small rodents too, and keeps the gophers away.

What is not generally known about the World's Fair in New York City is that it was visited several times by aliens. This was hinted at in the movie "Men in Black" but the true story was never told. It seems that as an experiment an alien culture visited the site of the Worlds Fair and attempted to bring some of the exhibits to life. It made one of the Mercury rockets operational to see the state of the earthling's technical prowess. It spun the Unisphere to experiment with the effect of gravitational pull in the earth's atmosphere in the event it needed to use asteroids as weapons against us. And it brought one of the dinosaurs to life as it briefly rampaged through Queens where it destroyed several cars and two homes and ate three Puerto Ricans. When they eventually forced it back to Flushing Meadow it was shot and killed by police and it was all hushed. As it died the massive beast voided its bowels and the New York Mets were born. Flushing Meadows has never quite been the same since.(The Secret History of Aliens Amongst Us, Art Bell, Roswell University Press, 1989)

@Tibore: my German Shepherd and I play stair-soccer(she defends the goal at the top) with one of those flexible openwork geodesic-looking balls about the size of a soccer ball. Standing at the bottom I throw it up to her, she catches it, thrashes it for a moment to kill it, then drops it to bounce down the stairs for me to retrieve and throw again. Hours of fun for both of us, and it took almost no time for her to train me to do it.

I'm glad you posted this. So cute. The first dog I got after I left home was a schnauzer/beagle cross. He did not like to catch things in his mouth - he always sat up and tried to catch the frisbee with his paws.